Urgent for an article on modern salt-making methods.

First, the method of suffering

Before Guangxu in Qing Dynasty, Pu Yuan, Qingcun and other places were boiled, and the process was to make brine first, and then cook salt.

1. Salt water manufacturing (mud scraping and leakage)

Sprinkle salty mud on the leaking bowl. After the salty mud is drained, dig it out with a shovel and pile it around the leaking bowl. This is called light mud, also called raw mud. There is a lot of accumulation. When the weather is fine or the west wind blows strongly, pick it between the saltworks with a dustpan, resurface the fields and let the seawater flow into the saltworks. Its salt is absorbed by light mud, exposed to the sun and wind, the water vapor evaporates, and the salt is attracted by it, so the field looks like Bai Rushuang, so it is called white land (that is, salt flower).

Scrape the mud to the salt field to turn white, flatten the waist of the drag knife with both hands, and walk backwards according to the framework of the drag knife to scrape the floating mud on the field surface into pieces.

The mud scraped out by copying mud is uneven in wet and dry, dried by the sun, dragged and scraped by two people, and copied repeatedly to make it dry and loose.

When the collected mud is dry and loose, two people guide the cutting board to make the soil integrate straight, and the distance between each line is about 3.5 meters, so as to facilitate soil picking. Mud mining is mostly operated by women and children.

Pick up the mud, put the salty mud in the dustpan, carry it to the center of the soil foundation, and pile it into a mound, which is called a mud mound. It is very strong, forming a sharp cone to prevent rainwater from penetrating. It's called a mud pile at any time.

To prevent the bottom of the bowl from leaking, first spread a layer of dried clams or ribbed hair, and then put the salty mud in the mud shed to make it flush with the mouth, and use your feet to be practical, so that you can climb up flat and smooth as a mirror.

After the leakage treatment is completed, seawater is extracted from the canal with a bucket and poured into the leaking bowl. Every few hours or half a day, brine will be poured into the bamboo tube from the bottom of the leakage through grasshoppers or ribs, and then poured into the brine tank.

When the halogen tank is full, pull it out with a halogen crane, pour it into a bucket, pick it up and hide it in another tank or halogen bucket to suffer.

Suffer pain

Stir-fry the salt with an iron plate. The iron plate is rectangular and consists of 3 ~ 8 pieces of iron, with a thickness of about one inch. The joints are filled with lime. At the top of the pointed furnace, it is woven with strip-shaped bamboo sticks, surrounded by iron plates, and the joint between bamboo and iron plates is also coated with lime, which is called brick slate. One end of the iron plate is close to the fire door, and the back end is on the stove. If there is still room, 2 ~ 4 iron pots are arranged vertically, which is called a warm pot.

After the dish is built, slip the brine from the brine bucket into the dish with bamboo, fill the warm pot at the same time, and put the firewood into the fire door for frying. After the brine in the warm pot is cooked, exchange and hang it in the dish towel, and then pour the cold brine into the warm pot. Repeatedly, the water in the brine in the dish evaporates, the salt gradually crystallizes, and then the temperature is raised, so that all the brine in the dish is boiled dry. By this time, the salt has been prepared and copied into the reeds with a salt shovel. It takes about 1.5 ~ 2.5 hours to fry a plate. Such constant suffering, fire day and night. On the fourth day or even the tenth day, the flameout is called the building. Each stove has a certain time limit, which is decided by the field officer.

Dismantle the iron plate immediately after the flameout, fry it later and build a new plate.

A load of salt water can cook 10 kg of salt. Its salt has many impurities, bitter taste, slightly black color, high cost and low yield.

Second, the plate drying method

During the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty (1796 ~ 1820), Wang Jinbang, a salt farmer in Daishan Island, Zhejiang Province, saw that the brine stored in the hollow of the pole was condensed into salt by the sun, so he tried to dry it with door panels at home, and the residents on the island followed suit. The salt dried on the plate has few impurities, white color, fresh taste, low cost and high yield. During the Xianfeng period (1851~1861), the residents were forced to make a living by boat and fled to the county seat, so the plate drying method spread. The local salt people saw that the board was baked into salt, and the bitter method was gradually eliminated because of imitation. In the seventh year of Guangxu (188 1 year), salt farmers in Pu Yuan and Qingcun all used plates to make salt.

1. brine extraction

At the low tide near the sea, the grass roots are cut off and as smooth as a mirror, which is called ash field (referring to fine soil as ash). The ash yard is divided into three sections: the offshore area is soaked in tide, which is not easy to be exposed to the sun, and it is the end; Among them, the middle part retreats at high tide and is easy to be exposed to the sun. This is the midfield; Those who are far from the sea, because the tide is too small, will carry water for irrigation and bask in the sun, so they are called beatings. Tidal flood: the first half of the lunar calendar is 13- 18, and the second half is from the 27th to the third day of next month, so the tide is full on the 6th. On the day of high tide, there were no three games. From the third day to the eighteenth day, the tide decreased day by day. First, the sunshine on the court, then the sunshine in the midfield, and then the sunshine at the end. Therefore, the upper intermediate people's court can be exposed twice a month, and only once in the end.

When the ground is frosted, put it away with a shovel. This is called scraping the soil. Pile the earth on the pier, pass through the bamboo tube from the middle, open a well next to it, and bury the crock. Most of them are one tower and one well, and some are two towers and one well. Pile up the piers and towers, pour water on them, and the brine will flow into the well from the bamboo tube, and then hang out the brine from the well and store it in the vat of sun-dried salt.

Make salt

Every sunny day, from 5 to 6 in the morning, the salt pan will be scattered on the ground, and then the stored brine will be poured on the pan with a wooden shovel until it is flat. After exposure in the sun, white particles appeared at the bottom of the board at 2 ~ 3 pm, which were scraped with wooden boards, and the brine that had not yet become salt was stored in the basket, and the brine became white salt after dripping. In spring and winter, the sunshine is weak, and the salt accumulation per board varies from 0.25 to 0.75 kg per day. In summer and autumn, about 2 kilograms of salt is formed every board day.

[salt-drying board]

Third, drying on the beach.

1in the spring of 958, when I visited Huaibei saltworks, I saw that the tidal flat was divided into several plaid fields, brine was made directly from seawater from top to bottom, and then salt was sun-dried in a crystallization pond. This method of drying salt on the beach saves time and effort and has high yield. In the same year, from the solstice of winter to the spring of 1959, two experimental beaches were built, covering an area of 200 mu. 196 1 year, under the guidance of technical personnel of Huaibei saltworks, the trial production was successful that year.

1967 spring, a comprehensive production reform was carried out. 65438+ In February of the same year, the saltworks seawall was built in the west section of Wynastang 1.5km and the east section of 2.5km, which was completed the following year, with a total area of 5.9km ... Under the guidance of Zhang Shuijia of Andong saltworks in Cixi County, Zhejiang Province, two sluices, yangqiao and Yingfang, were built, expanding the beach area by more than 6,000 mu. After unified planning, the original drying board base was demolished, and the 1.6 million mu beach was divided into 25 salt-producing areas (production teams), which were divided into evaporation pool (also known as flood board), regulating board, crystallization board and crystallization pool. 65,438+0,970 The whole project was completed and put into production. At this point, the beach drying completely replaced the board drying.

All beach drying operations are mechanized and semi-mechanized. In the flood season, press the button to open the gate, and the seawater will automatically flood into the Haitang River. When the tide ebbs, the sluice is closed to keep the seawater in the seawall of Hanoi, and then the seawater is pumped into the reservoir by a water pump, and then pumped into the evaporation pool by a water pump. After that, the seawater flows from high to low into the regulating plate (also known as the regulating grid) and the crystallization plate (also known as the crystallization grid), and finally enters the brine pool. All the above processes are mechanized. After the brine is clarified in the brine pool, it is poured into the crystallization pool by handcart or brine bucket in the morning. By 4 pm, the brine in the crystallization pool has condensed into salt. At this time, the salt is scraped into a pile with a salt scraper, and then transported to the salt lump with salt reeds. After being drenched with brine into dry salt, it is loaded into luggage case, transported into warehouses and collected by the state. Most of the above processes are semi-mechanized.